Iranian Americans are among the more misunderstood segments of the population, in part because of their adopted nation's complicated history with Iran, and because of a sea of misinformation about them.

Andrew Goldberg's "The Iranian Americans," airing Tuesday on PBS, is a worthy beginning in helping the rest of us get to know our Iranian American neighbors, but it also leaves so much unexplored, you can't help wondering if the fact that it's essentially an infomercial, funded by Iranian American individuals and foundations, may have blinded Goldberg from seeing the full potential of this story.

The film is valuable as far as it goes, especially as it recounts the years when the United States essentially dismantled democracy in Iran and instead installed the late Shah of Iran, not known as a dynamic leader, to be so much of a puppet that we see a clip of President Jimmy Carter saying the United States has no greater friend than Iran and no world leader more beloved than the shah. The Iranian Revolution not only toppled the shah and installed the Ayatollah Khomeini, it also resulted in 1979 in a mass immigration of tens of thousands of Iranians, many of whom settled in the United States.

Interestingly, the pace of assimilation has not been rapid among Iranian Americans, at first because there was a pervasive notion that their stay in the United States would only be temporary.

"We packed for two weeks - we stayed for 30 years," Jobrani says.

Older emigres never considered that they would die in the United States, says Dumas, but over time, Iranian Americans had to come to terms with the reality that they would probably live out their days in the United States. One woman says she's never been to her mother's grave near the Caspian Sea and you know she's probably thinking she never will make that visit.

While there was much about American culture that had attracted Iranians before they immigrated, Iranian Americans work ardently to preserve their own culture, with many families speaking only Farsi at home and preparing traditional Iranian dishes, even while making sure there was a Christmas tree every year for the kids.

Goldberg's primary focus is to tell us how much Iranian Americans have achieved and how much we really don't know about them. For example, while many Americans automatically think all Iranians are Muslim, in fact, they represent a wide variety of faiths, including Armenian Christian, Jewish, Zoroastrian and Baha'i, among others.

While Goldberg succeeds in his limited purpose, as an infomercial, "The Iranian Americans" makes us want to know more. While there's no question that firsthand accounts are informative and often moving, we're left to wonder how much more perspective and depth could have been added by outside academics and experts on population and sociology who could have, say, discussed different assimilation patterns among various ethnic groups, or compared ethnic prejudice among those groups at various points in our history.